Danny Hooley here, and I'm brand-new to this forum (well, not entirely, considering I once used the alias "peenut" but retired that username some years back).

That being said, I love Nintendo games, especially the Gametek games that the NES released e.g. "Jeopardy!," "Wheel of Fortune," "Family Feud" and my personal favorite, "Double Dare."

If you think THOSE games are good, I wanna talk about an NES game Gametek made but NEVER released: "Card Sharks."

Like most Gametek games, "Card Sharks" was adapted from the hit TV game show of the same name and had 2 players answer a survey "Family Feud"-type question e.g. "We asked 100 Single Men if they could have Sex with Heather Locklear, would they have Sex with her? How many would say Yes, they'd love to have Sex with Heather Locklear?" One player would guess a number, and his/her opponent would have to guess if it was a Higher or Lower number.

Whoever won 2 out of 3 games won the entire game and went on to a Bonus game called "Money Cards," where the winner would bet all or part of their earnings for a chance to double their initial winnings and/or earn a new car--just like the TV game show.

Considering that fact, I have a proposal for you readers, and that is for those of you who know anybody who worked at Gametek between 1987 and 1998, I suggest that you get in touch with the Gametek contact and ask them on my behalf if a Prototype of "Card Sharks" exists; if it does, then I suggest that you get in touch with me privately via email at danielshooley3@yahoo.com

When you email me, I expect you to tell me whether or not a Prototype exists, and in the event it does, I suggest you convert the Prototype into an NES ROM and send the ROM to me via email.

Thanks for the interest, and while I know Lost Levels wants to find and release as many canceled games as they can, it is often not easy.

Of course it depends on a prototype even existing in the first place.
Many were often deleted as development carts were often reused for other games.
Sometimes games never even make it to actual coding stage (example: there seems to be contradicting stories on how the far the Final Fantasy IV for Famicom actually got)

Some Lost Level guys do have contacts with older game developers, so if they could get in touch with former Gametek employees, I'm sure they would.
(though thing is, Gametek was known to only publish games. They often contracted other companies like Rare to actually develop the games. The N64 Robotech game that sunk them was said to be one of their few in-house games.)

The other thing about buying prototypes is that LL is often in competition with other collectors, and if the owner is not willing to share the game on their own, it can make it expensive to buy/borrow the game and dump it, if they are given an option to.

I do remember reading years ago, it was at least rumored that one former dev of a canceled game (Police Academy) had a proto but didn't want to share as they were concerned with being sued by the copyright owner (uh, Warner?). An understandable position, but that sort of thing can happen in this scene.

But if a prototype was confirmed to exist and they were able to obtain it and dump it, they wouldn't email you the ROM. They'd post it for everyone!

I'm only going to by my experience watching the site.

Personally I'd like to know just HOW they expected Password (original, Super, whatever) to even work on the NES. As I recall, the show was about giving auditory one-word clues (with pronunciation going a long way as a secondary clue).
Maybe they expected people to play by the honor system, for the player receiving the clue to not look at the answer on the TV?
Or would it have been restricted to a single-player game?

That Card Sharks announcement was made at CES with no screenshots or gameplay, so it's entirely possible they were just gauging holiday interest from buyers before they even started development. That was a common practice then.

Card Sharks seems a bit surprising as wasn't the TV show fairly short lived?
Like, I hadn't even heard of it until watching reruns on the Game Show Network in the early 2000s.

Though I'm not sure if Classic Concentration was that widely remembered, but it still got a game out.
Perhaps it depended on if they got it out while the show was still running.
What year was that again on the Card Sharks announcement?
(Wikipedia says the TV series first ran 1978-81 and then another version 1986-89)

Though I hadn't heard of Press Your Luck, likewise until GSN reruns in 2001, and their subsequent remake in 2002 (I had only see the original for a few months but already could tell that "Double Whammy" consequence of dropping crap on the losers' heads was nothing but spitting on a classic). And yet there was a Wii version, let alone I think more than one edition. Did they make a more recent version the TV show I didn't know of?

Though I hadn't heard of Press Your Luck [...] And yet there was a Wii version, let alone I think more than one edition. Did they make a more recent version the TV show I didn't know of?

It came out on Windows, iOS, and DS as well as Wii. It was also later made available for PS3 via PSN in a bundle with Family Feud and The Price is Right.

My purely speculative guess is it was just one of a million cheap iOS cash-ins that was extremely easy to port to the other systems.

There was a documentary about the guy who figured out the pattern of the board and was able to game the system and win over $100,000, which was a record at the time for most money ever won on a game show. That was released in 2003, however, so unlikely to be connected to the video game released 6 years later.

Press Your Luck was my all time favorite game show, so I'm surprised I hadn't heard about the newish version of the game. (I played the GameTek DOS version back in the day.)

I had that DOS Price is Right, back on my Commodore Colt 286. It used to glitch out half the time, since we didn't have a CGA card. Still, was one of the only real games we had. Glad we got a NES about a year later!